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Happy 10th anniversary, Mac BU!

The Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft turns 10 years old this week. What …

Welp, no one else on the Mac web seems to care that today is the 10-year anniversary of Steve Jobs' return to Apple, but this week also signifies another 10-year anniversary: the 10-year anniversary of the formation of the Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) at Microsoft! Incidentally, this anniversary (February 6, 1997) falls just one day before the Jobs return (February 7, 1997).

What did the Mac BU do to celebrate? Well, they nerded it the hell up, it seems. One ambitious employee, Joe LeBlanc, and two cohorts, Jessica Lambert and Matt Elggren, arrived at the office at 6am yesterday to set up giant, pixelated designs in the windows, made entirely out of sticky notes.

The display was "designed" in Excel, oddly enough, and made use of exactly 1,336 different-colored sticky notes.

(Photos from Microsoft's Mac Mojo)

Read the entire transcript of Mac BU's David Weiss interviewing Joe LeBlanc about how and, importantly, why the team did this. If you ever wanted to learn how to make monolithic, pixelated representations of your favorite OS X icons in Excel to be implemented in sticky notes, now's your chance.

So, happy anniversary, Mac BU! The Mac world, while harsh at times, wouldn't be the same without you guys.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui